Making machine intelligence less scary for criminal analysts: reflections on designing a visual comparative case analysis tool

A fundamental task in Criminal Intelligence Analysis is to analyze the similarity of crime cases, called CCA, to identify common crime patterns and to reason about unsolved crimes. Typically, the data is complex and high dimensional and the use of complex analytical processes would be appropriate. State-of-the-art CCA tools lack flexibility in interactive data exploration and fall short of computational transparency in terms of revealing alternative methods and results. In this paper, we report on the design of the Concept Explorer, a flexible, transparent and interactive CCA system. During this design process, we observed that most criminal analysts are not able to understand the underlying complex technical processes, which decrease the users' trust in the results and hence a reluctance to use the tool}. Our CCA solution implements a computational pipeline together with a visual platform that allows the analysts to interact with each stage of the analysis process and to validate the result. The proposed Visual Analytics workflow iteratively supports the interpretation of the results of clustering with the respective feature relations, the development of alternative models, as well as cluster verification. The visualizations offer an understandable and usable way for the analyst to provide feedback to the system and to observe the impact of their interactions. Expert feedback confirmed that our user-centred design decisions made this computational complexity less scary to criminal analysts

A Synthesis of Tagging Studies Examining the Behaviour and Survival of Anadromous Salmonids in Marine Environments

This paper synthesizes tagging studies to highlight the current state of knowledge concerning the behaviour and survival of anadromous salmonids in the marine environment. Scientific literature was reviewed to quantify the number and type of studies that have investigated behaviour and survival of anadromous forms of Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.), Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), brown trout (Salmo trutta), steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss), and cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii). We examined three categories of tags including electronic (e.g. acoustic, radio, archival), passive (e.g. external marks, Carlin, coded wire, passive integrated transponder [PIT]), and biological (e.g. otolith, genetic, scale, parasites). Based on 207 papers, survival rates and behaviour in marine environments were found to be extremely variable spatially and temporally, with some of the most influential factors being temperature, population, physiological state, and fish size. Salmonids at all life stages were consistently found to swim at an average speed of approximately one body length per second, which likely corresponds with the speed at which transport costs are minimal. We found that there is relatively little research conducted on open-ocean migrating salmonids, and some species (e.g. masu [O. masou] and amago [O. rhodurus]) are underrepresented in the literature. The most common forms of tagging used across life stages were various forms of external tags, coded wire tags, and acoustic tags, however, the majority of studies did not measure tagging/handling effects on the fish, tag loss/failure, or tag detection probabilities when estimating survival. Through the interdisciplinary application of existing and novel technologies, future research examining the behaviour and survival of anadromous salmonids could incorporate important drivers such as oceanography, tagging/handling effects, predation, and physiology

Using Software Visualization for Supporting the Teaching of Map Reduce

The increasing number of cybersecurity threats we are facing nowadays is fueling the development of new detection and contrast techniques based on the analysis of Big data[?]. In such a setting, the MapReduce paradigm has quickly become the de facto standard for carrying out this processing. This has led to a surge in the number of job offerings involving this skill. Moreover, we are experiencing a significant increase in the number of computer science courses covering this paradigm as well as its most popular implementations, Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop. In this paper, it is presented a solution for supporting the teaching of MapReduce through the use of software visualization. The proposed solution has two main goals. The first is to help students in understanding how the MapReduce paradigm succeeds in solving a complex problem by decomposing it in simpler sub problems, where each of these is solved by means of a map and/or a reduce operation. The second is about the capability of showing the way an input dataset is partitioned in blocks and processed in parallel by the different computing units of a distributed computing system. In both cases, the use of software visualization techniques with proper graphical metaphors helps the students in understanding what is going on, by providing them with a graphical representation that, on a side, describes how the considered algorithm works on a real dataset while, on the other side, illustrating the speed-up achieved thanks to the distributed approach. Our solution is based on the Spark implementation of the MapReduce paradigm. It allows a user (either a teacher or a student) to assemble a MapReduce distributed computation by interacting with a selection of supported distributed operations. Once an operation is selected, it is executed and visualized using a proper animation. This is assembled so as to reflect the distributed nature of the operation. The sequence of animations obtained by the execution of a flow of operations illustrates their behavior while showing how the input dataset is transformed along the time

The value of information visualization

Researchers and users of Information Visualization are convinced that it has value. This value can easily be communicated to others in a face-to-face setting, such that this value is experienced in practice. To convince broader audiences, and also, to understand the intrinsic qualities of visualization is more difficult, however. In this paper we consider information visualization from different points of view, and gather arguments to explain the value of our field

Small and rural A resource book for small and rural congregations throughout the country

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:q97/08917 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Visual Construction of Highly Interactive Applications

This paper presents Whizz'Ed, an experimental tool for construction of highly interactive or animated applications. Whizz'Ed makes it possible to visually describe by direct manipulation the behaviour of graphical objects and their interrelations. It provides elementary bricks that encapsulate basic interactive behaviours. Whizz'Ed aims at allowing designers to build visual programs in which the control structure is described using data-flows. The flow graph can be structured in order to reuse complex behaviours, thus allowing the designer to create new reusable bricks at design time. Whizz'Ed provide designers with a visual environment that can be used for building user interfaces as well as for database visualization